TOM UTLEY: Its vast inherited wealth has ruined the Guardian. But call me an old softie - how poignant to see all those Pollys and Zoes having to go up North

Call me an old softie, but I find something profoundly poignant in this week’s news that the dear old Guardian is ‘actively considering’ moving its headquarters from north London back to its birthplace in Manchester.

What breaks my heart is not just the thought of uprooting all those Pollys, Zoes, Jacks and Amelias from the wine bars, arthouse cinemas and polenta restaurants of the capital, where they have made themselves so comfortably at home.

No, this is the parable of the prodigal son, re-spun for the modern age. (To avoid offending the Guardian’s sensibilities, let me be quite clear that I use the word ‘son’ to include prodigal daughters and prodigal members of the gender-fluid community).

Money’s the problem, of course, as it was with the protagonist of Jesus’s story — the son who squandered his lavish inheritance before returning home to throw himself on his father’s mercy and beg for a place among the family’s hired servants.

Call me an old softie, but I find something profoundly poignant in this week’s news that the dear old Guardian is ‘actively considering’ moving its headquarters from north London back to its birthplace in Manchester

We all know what happened next — or at least, those of us do who were brought up in the age when schools took seriously their duty to impart knowledge of our country’s Christian heritage.

Far from the harsh reception he was expecting, the prodigal found himself warmly welcomed by the father he had let down so badly.

In the words of the Gospel of St Luke: ‘. . . the father said to his servants, “Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found”.’

What sort of welcome awaits the Guardian when it slinks back to Manchester, I cannot say. Only one thing can be said with certainty. If the paper does indeed return home, the locals will find it completely unrecognisable as the great, crusading liberal organ that started life in their magnificent city back in 1821, before it set off in 1964 to lose its fortune in London.

The modern equivalent of the prodigal’s father was C. P. Scott, who edited the Manchester Guardian for 57 years from 1872, becoming its owner in 1907 when he bought it from the estate of the son of its founder, a cotton merchant.

In 1936, Scott’s son John set up a handsomely endowed trust ‘to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference’.

It was a beautiful idea. But what perhaps the Scott family didn’t realise was that by liberating the paper from grubby commercial constraints, they were also freeing its journalists from the need to write anything that might interest readers, or reflect their concerns, enough to persuade them to buy it.

The paper’s staff knew that no matter how carelessly they frittered away their inheritance, they could always rely on Daddy — in the form of the Scott Trust — to pick up the bills.

The only wonder is that they have managed to keep going for so long, burning up the trust’s banknotes with losses running into tens of millions of pounds a year.

Meanwhile, the irony has never seemed to occur to them, as they pontificated against the exploitation of workers, that they themselves have been living like aristocratic absentee landlords at the expense of poor toilers in the trust’s profitable companies.

But of course they couldn’t go on for ever, staggering from one stupefyingly inept business decision to the next, while shedding readers by the hundreds of thousands. It was inevitable that even their massive inherited wealth would begin to dry up.

But chins up, Polly, Zoe & Co. If you are sent back to Manchester, it’s too much to hope your paper will re-connect with reality. But at least you’ll be reunited with your old friends at the BBC, the prodigals exiled to Salford (pictured) before you

Hence the heart-rendingly pathetic pleas for charitable donations that appear on the Guardian’s website (‘Since you’re here, we’ve got a small favour to ask . . .’) Hence, too, those thoughts of returning home to Manchester.

Which brings me to the most interesting aspect of the Guardian’s story. By this, I mean the truly remarkable way in which the paper’s views have changed since it abandoned its roots in the great northern capital of the Industrial Revolution.

In the 19th century, the Manchester Guardian was the voice of manufacturing and free trade, a stalwart champion of small government. It was ‘liberal’ in the old sense of the word, before its meaning was hijacked by the likes of Nick Clegg, with their passion for regulation and state interference in every aspect of our lives.

With its eye constantly on promoting economic growth, the paper took a particularly dim view of workers’ strikes, arguing that the raison d’etre of trade union leaders was to avoid settling disputes, since ‘they live on strife’.

In the words of its working-class competitor, the Manchester and Salford Advertiser, the Guardian was ‘the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners’.

As late as the Forties, the paper was so hostile to the Left-winger Aneurin Bevan ‘and the hate-gospellers of his entourage’ that it called for Clement Attlee’s postwar government to be voted out of office. Today, its contributors worship Bevan and Attlee and the welfarism they espoused.

According to David Kynaston’s masterly history, Austerity Britain 1945-1951, the paper even opposed the creation of the NHS. This was on the morally repugnant grounds that free healthcare for all would ‘eliminate selective elimination’, leading to an increase in the numbers of congenitally deformed and feckless people. In other words, the Guardian wanted the weak to be left to die.

You don’t hear much from Guardian writers today, when they are attacking other papers for embarrassing episodes in their long-distant past, about their own employer’s more recent, disgusting flirtation with Nazi-style eugenics.

So what prompted the paper’s lurch to the Left? If you ask me, the answer lies in the way it is funded. For in freeing Guardian journalists from all considerations of commercial reality, the Scott Trust inadvertently began a process that has cut them off from every other aspect of the real world, the way it works and the real people who inhabit it.

Why else do they persist in their fantasy that the answer to every social problem lies in expanding the public sector (after all, doesn’t money grow on trees)? And why else were they so totally baffled when the country voted for Brexit? Doesn’t everyone think, as they do, that we are better off in the hands of a statist bureaucracy?

Whatever the truth, the paper that left Manchester in touch with at least some sense of reality, banging the drum for free trade and deregulation, now lives in a la-la land of its own. This is a world in which the burning issues of the day are rights for the gender-fluid, the pressing need for more wind farms and the vital importance of re-educating voters until they understand the charms of Jean-Claude Juncker and EU protectionism.

But chins up, Polly, Zoe & Co. If you are sent back to Manchester, it’s too much to hope your paper will re-connect with reality. But at least you’ll be reunited with your old friends at the BBC, the prodigals exiled to Salford before you.

As the great echo chamber of the subsidised Left moves north, you can be sure that they, at least, will welcome you with that proverbial fatted calf.